About Vegans - The REAL reason why we should all be vegan

Why is being vegan a conservationist posture? Is being vegan a synonym of hugging bunnies?

A couple of days ago I came across a group of people that belong to an organization that I don't get very well with, basically because I believe that they abuse the naive/ignorant population to upkeep their business. They are these folks that play the "whale-saving ecologist" role, while all they do is burn down crops that people planted and rely on to pay their bills as if they were middle-age witches. I got close ready to ask what were they begging for this time, what parasitic idea they came up with.

-Me: Hello, what are you doing?
-Yellow+Blue.Peace: Hello, we are gathering signatures to present a proposal to stop the deforestation at the northern sides of our country, do you want to sign?
-Me: While you seek for signatures (in a piece of paper, with a wooden table)... Do you seriously believe that signatures change anything?
-Y+B.P: Yes, of course, otherwise we wouldn't do it.
-Me: And, I suppose that you know the causes of that deforestation, don't you?
-Y+B.P: Hmmm, yes. Producers that do that to plant soy.
- Me: What is the soy planted for?
-Y+B.P: ...
-Me: Allow me to inform you then. Those forest are being cut down for 3 main reasons: Opening up spaces for cattle (because, you know, cows do not eat wood),planting soy to feed animals that are indeed lots and some other minor industrial uses, and as a secondary objective, growing cotton to make the t-shirts that you and me are wearing now, and also are the prime material of the shirts you're selling at a very high price now....
-Y+B.P: Yes, but with signatures we can ask the government to stop that.
(She was kinda... slow, since she didn't get the part where I remarked the classic hypocrisy her organization lives under)
-Me: I seriously doubt that our country will just delete the current plans it has for industry and agronomy: where the main interest is increasing the productivity of our lands. I believe that the problem needs a bit more work than sitting our asses down gathering signatures off random people that will sign having no idea of what they are applying for; don't you? Have a NICE day.

---

At school they teach us that we should always take care of nature, because from it, we acquire our resources to stay alive. Seems like lots of people forget the reasons. Others get annoyed because of a piece of paper in the ground, curse their neighbors because they're washing their cars "wasting water" and even go to summits, where they scream like baboons asking for a power plant to shut down... While later they will post the pictures of that, from their computers... Powered by: that power plant.

So, what about FOOD? It's not magic, it has to come out of somewhere, and that place is... Nature, my friends. Today, feeding our population is on of the major causes of environmental degradation, perhaps, with a greater impact than the major industrial projects.

The Sun, that shiny face that the ancients adore as god (but one that did things), generates energy thanks to the reactions that undergo inside of it. This energy travels through the space and arrives to our planet in different shapes, being one of them what we call "light". This energy is gathered by the plants and by photosynthesis -that also requires carbon dioxide and water- produce glucose. This is how, vegetation is the first step in the food stairway. The ones on the next step (those that eat vegetation) will only exploit 10% of the energy contained in those plants. The rest is lost in the shape of heat, movement, sweat, wind... and so on. this is the natural flow of the "energy of life". Just like Reiki, but real. And this process is the base of our problem.

The ones that eat meat (SPOILER ALERT) are the third step and there is the key of the dilemma: We need an ENORMOUS surface of grasslands (when animals are raised free roaming) or huge fields to harvest when those animals are raised in feedlots.

How do we do that? Well, we clear woods and jungles to create new grasslands and fields. At such point that the main deforestation cause in the countries with an agro-exporting economic model are the ones that are closely related with meat production. This is why we need 75% of the agronomic lands of the world to raise that little calf we are going to eat this x-mas; this is also the reason why a nice BBQ is actually the responsible of ecosystem fragmenting and the constant punishment we apply over biodiversity. Besides, so many grasslands are leaving no free lands in several regions, NOT A METER OF FREE LAND: EVERYTHING IS PRIVATE.

"But vegans adore soy, if we all became vegan we would need to plant even more soy. CHECKMATE, HERBIVORE!" Do you seriously believe that all that soy is for human consumption? Those soy fields that are a usual landscape lately in my country, Argentina, are in a major percentage destined to feed animals that will end up at my grill every weekend. We may also need to state that plants need water to grow (yes, can you believe that?!) and at several places the water "in situ" is just not enough. So adding the artificial watering, meat production takes more than half of the potable water we get in the world.

Deforesting to grow grains and adding fertilizers set free huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (carbon dioxide and nitrous acid, respectively). In this way, my weekend "asado" becomes one of the main causes of the emission of greenhouse gases and global warming.

Naturalist fallacies of the sort of "we always ate meat", "we are omnivores", "why do you think we've fangs for?", are not acceptable. Yes, all the previous are really facts, but: If there's something that defines humankind is its capacity for adaptation and THAT is the reason why we are omnivores. The omnivore condition does not mean that we HAVE to eat everything in our path it means that we can adapt our diet to our necessities. Just like when we used to go out on the weekends, sometimes you ate what you liked, and many times, you ended up with the ugly one... and you had to adapt to the not-so-pretty sight you got at the next morning.

So, there's little use of you surfing with whales of throwing rocks to Japanese whaler ships, if you later come back home and have a nice steak for lunch. The problem goes beyond taste, traditions of how much you like animals.

It is simple: Either we adapt and survive, or we extinguish ourselves.

---

If you liked this post and its informal way of talking about sciences, please, follow me for more!

Leave a comment either for good or for bad reviews. I take everything as constructive, and I really appreciate the feedback, even from trolls (at least a troll read it before being himself!).

---

Copyrights:

---

All the previously used images are of my authory or under a CC0 license (Source: pixabay), unless openly stated.

All the Images created by me possess a WTFPL licencing and they are free to redistribute, share, copy, paste, modify, sell, crop, paste, clone in whatever way you want.

---